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Surprising Bargains

With bargains exceedingly hard to find in today's stock market, investors can turn to companies with different structures—like REITs, MLPs, and business development companies—for bigger payouts and more growth.

To find bargains in a full-price stock market, investors with an appetite for risk should look to a niche within a niche: so-called pass-through businesses that offer plenty of exposure to the ongoing economic recovery.

Pass-throughs include an alphabet soup of business structures that avoid corporate taxes so long as they "pass" the bulk of profits to shareholders as dividends or distributions. Listed ones trade like stocks. There are REITs, or real-estate investment trusts, many of which invest in...